Pronunciation of Old Norse (standard)

by Óskar Guðlaugsson 2000

The most effective way of identifying sound values in brevity is the use of phonetic alphabets such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which uses various characters from the Latin and Greek alphabets, capital and small, to represent all the different sounds enunciable by human beings. There are sounds in the IPA chart that most people will never have heard of, as the range of sounds used in human speech is enormous.

The main problem with the IPA system is that, with its heavy use of unconventional characters, phoneticizing with it is practically impossible in computer documents; no normal keyboards support the less conventional IPA characters, and even if one downloads the fonts available for it, the sheer amount of different IPA symbols makes it impossible to type it fast enough. Not to mention problems with converting the results onto other people's computer screens.

The solution to this has been the adoption of a new version of IPA, one whose characters are all available on "normal" keyboards (such as American ones). Instead of interchanging Greek, Latin, and various arcane letters, this new computer standard, called SAMPA, fully exploits differentiation by capitals and small caps, and also uses special characters such as { } @ & etc, as well as numbers.

For the purposes of this course, we will only present here relevant characters, i.e. those representing sounds in Modern English and Old Norse. To begin with, here are "standard" English sounds (both General American (GA) and Received Pronunciation (RP)):

(in phonetics, [] is always used to contain phonetic transcriptions)

[:] following a vowel represents that vowel being long, i.e. of roughly double duration to short of vowels (do not confuse with common English definitions of 'long a as in date, short as in cat'). Diphthongs (two different vowels combined) are long by default.

I will not go into the proper transcription of the last few cases in rhotic dialects; it is not relevant to the study of Old Norse.

It is very important to differentiate capitals vs small-caps in SAMPA (cannot be said too often). [A] for example is a different sound to [a] (the latter being closer to [O]). It is also very important to note that anything within [] represents phonetic transcription; that must therefore not be read as English orthography!

You will probably be finding the SAMPA transcription for English rather "bulky" or inconvenient; that is normal, since the transcription would not do well to define itself by English sounds, which aren't necessarily "standard" in comparison to other languages. Remember, phonetics is the science of all languages, not only English.

Once again, remember that phonetic vowel length, represented by [:], has nothing to do with English definitions of long vowels, like 'a as in date'.

Orthographic SAMPA Notes
á [A:] note the length mark; not a common sound in English
a [A] dialects; see 'ar' above, also like
Spanish 'a', for example
é [e:]
e [e]
í [i:]
i [i]
ó [o:] does not exist on its own in
English; like 'o' in Spanish,
o [o] French, German, and many others
ú [u:]
u [u]
ý [y:] this is the dreaded 'rounded
[i]'; if you lack Old Norse
y [y] samples for this, look for French
pronunciation of 'u',
or German 'ü', which are also
pronounced [y]; it is pronounced by rounding
the lips (as when one pronounces [u] or [o])
and saying [i]
ö [O]
(i.e. tailed o)
oe [2:] doesn't exist in English; look
for 'eu' as in 'feu' in French
ø [2]
æ [E:]
au [Au] trivial difference to English [AU];
more like Spanish 'au'
ei [Ei] similar to Spanish 'ei'
ey [9y] once again, look to French: like
'euille' in 'feuille'

Double consonants: pronounced with double length, i.e. 'alla' is [AllA]. This is not normally done in English, though sequences of words may produce double consonants (geminates), e.g. 'black cow' [bl{k kAU]. If you pronounce 'black cow' as one word, you have [kk] in the middle.

Stress in Old Norse always falls on the first syllable, or rather, all stems are stressed. ON words are always just <stem> + <ending>, stems never being more than one syllable; longer words, i.e. with more than one stem syllable, are composed. In a composed word, e.g. 'fingrbjörg', stress falls primarily on the first syllable (the first stem), 'fing', and secondarily on the next stem, 'björg'. Endings only contain the short vowels 'a, i, u'; syllables with long (accented) vowels or diphthongs can thus always be recognized as stem syllables, and therefore entitled to stress.

We have not described the pronunciation of modern Icelandic. Guides can be found on the Net. This one is fairly good.